Sunday, December 16, 2012

Gaming is Now 100 Years Old

Gaming as we know it - that is, a hobby surrounding commercial games that simulate conflict, marketed to the general public for entertainment - began one hundred years ago, in December 1912. That's when H.G. Wells published the first installment of his Little Wars in the Christmas issue of Windsor Magazine. Wells was already famous for the science-fiction novels he had published in the 1890s, but his more recent work focused more on the present day, and the looming shadow of war that hung over Europe. By going beyond just writing about war, and instead providing seminal rules for simulating it, Wells laid the groundwork for all of the twentieth-century gaming that would follow.
Wells did not invent wargaming himself: since the late eighteenth century, recognizable wargames had been popular in the German-speaking world as tools for training officers. Wells however saw an opportunity for deriving pure entertainment from such games by simplifying them and emphasizing playability over strict realism. In this regard he surely drew on the ideas of Stevenson before him, who devised wargames for his young stepson in the early 1880s, but Stevenson never published his rules, whereas Wells presciently marketed them as a commercial product.

And the rules were all Wells provided. While board games of the day sold you a kit, Wells assumed you could find your own implements of play. He favored the toy soldiers made by Britains, large and sturdy miniatures that represented the three branches of the nineteenth-century military: infantry, cavalry and artillery. His rules covered the creation of the terrain, unit movement and of course combat. Famously, his combat is diceless: melee is decided by numerical superiority, while ranged artillery strikes were simulated by literally shooting wooden dowels from toy cannons in order to topple enemy soldiers.

By publishing his rules originally in a magazine, Wells inaugurated a long tradition of sharing wargame systems through periodicals: a process critical to the open and collaborative development of miniature wargames. The rules span only five pages in Windsor Magazine, and can easily be absorbed with only a few minutes of study. Little Wars would not appear in book form until after the new year, and it includes a detailed and thoroughly-illustrated example of play (which first appeared in the January 1913 issue of Windsor) as well as some notes towards a more complex version of the game for military use.

While it did not immediately create a wargaming hobby, Little Wars inspired wargamers on both sides of the Atlantic. Norman Bel Geddes and Fletcher Pratt both drew on Wells's example for their own early American games, and in England, J.C. Sachs of the British Model Soldier Society built his influential rules on Wells's foundation. Through countless intermediaries, the principles of simulation pioneered by Wells survive in the systems of games today. In fact, in the introduction to a 2004 edition of Little Wars, Gygax said unambiguously that "Little Wars influenced my development of both the Chainmail miniatures rules and the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game." That latter game in turn influenced the lion's share of computer game development from the 1970s onwards. But Wells's creation shouldn't be relegated to the dusty bookshelves of history: on this centenary of gaming, Little Wars remains as vital and playable as ever.

7 comments:

> Gaming as we know it - that is, a hobby surrounding commercial games that simulate conflict, marketed to the general public for entertainment - began one hundred years ago, in December 1912.

Just a bit late for the centenary, IMO; even for the UK.Polemos had already gone through three editions by 1890 ( http://wargamingmiscellanybackup.wordpress.com/category/polemos/ ) and was very much in the public eye at the time, having been awarded a prize medal at the 1885 South Kensington International Inventions Exhibition.

Sachs himself was at the Exhibition but the game "did not dwell in his memory". (BMSS 1948:6) How history might have been different otherwise? :)

Of course there were games that preceded Wells - I do mention Stevenson above, for example, which goes back to 1881, as well as the German traditions that Polemos copies. It is not a simple matter to define when the gaming "culture" of today began, and the choice of criteria will no doubt influence our opinions of the matter. What I argue here is that gaming "as we know it" started with Wells, in particular because he published rules alone (rather selling say a board and pieces), that he left it to the players to choose their own pieces and terrain, that he published his rules in a periodical first, and that those rules directly inspired the protagonists who began the gaming hobby. Sachs's game surely is a modernization and elaboration of Wells, for example, not any pre-existing board game. Others may feel that some other criteria are more important, but I'd say that if Wells had never published, we couldn't rely on something like Polemos to kick-start gaming as we know it.

It would be just as easy to declare a history of "false start" upon "false start" - depending on what one's definition of "false" might be, and where one believes the target at the end of the trajectory to be.The "commercial game" field lay fallow for some time after Wells but the hobbyists were still at play around the world.

It's the same argument as when it comes to defining "roleplaying games" and the manner in which that was retconned by the relevant parties. (Albeit a large chunk of the CRPGing public probably don't use the same definition of RPG as the specific D&D paradigm and culture, either).

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less". :)

> What I argue here is that gaming "as we know it" started with Wells, in particular because he published rules alone (rather selling say a board and pieces), that he left it to the players to choose their own pieces and terrain,

As y'know, not all the predecessors to Wells were sold as boxed games only; the "hobby" was definitely more in military circles at that point, however, so in most people's eyes that probably wouldn't count as a "hobby"...

> that he published his rules in a periodical first, and that those rules directly inspired the protagonists who began the gaming hobby.

In a very specific English-speaking context.

> but I'd say that if Wells had never published, we couldn't rely on something like Polemos to kick-start gaming as we know it.

*nods*. And a similar argument had Boot Hill been published before D&D by TSR; save that that paradigm genie was already out of the bottle elsewhere? ;)

This is something of a familiar argument between you and I, yes. I do think it is the job of historians to identify inflection points, while not ignoring the bigger picture of influences that steer the narrative of events. While we could mention any number of prior works that Wells must have tacitly studied (the "Great War Game for Young and Old" comes to mind), these are games that have only recently been rediscovered by historians, while "Little Wars" has enjoyed consistent acclaim since it first appeared. When we ask why, we must look to all sorts of contingent, soft factors: Wells's own personal fame at the time he released the rules, the simplicity of the rules themselves, and so on. But I think it's hard to dispute that he brought these ideas to a popular audience vastly larger than any prior author, and that many attributes of later games show the clear influence of his ideas.

Whether or not this is when "gaming" began is of course a point on which intelligent people can disagree, and I understand if you consider it an oversimplification at best. But I think it's a worthy headline to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Little Wars" - anything less just seemed like an understatement.

The Britains 4.7" Naval Gun is the implement that Wells favored. It is pictured above, both from my own collection and in Wells's black-and-white battle illustration. They can regularly be found on eBay (just search for "britains 4.7"), though expect to pay a premium, especially for early models. I see five or six up right now.